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The Sun is white and not yellow, confirms former NASA astronaut!

One must be taken aback by this because we have known our good old pal to be of yellow colour for a long time now. But turning the tables, ex-NASA astronaut Scott Kelly confirms this fact.

TN Science Desk

Updated Sep 15, 2022, 16:09 IST

The Sun is white and not yellow confirms former NASA astronaut

September 15, 2022: Former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly has a confirmed answer for a long-going dispute: is the sun yellow or white? One must be taken aback by this because we have known our good old pal to be of yellow colour for a long time now. But turning the tables, ex-NASA astronaut Scott Kelly shared a space fact over twitter and tweeted that he can confirm this.

Not yellow? Then why does it appear so?

Because of our environment, the sun appears yellow. However, once outside the Earth's atmosphere, the Sun looks white rather than any other colour. This is due to the way our eyes perceive colour.

As the amount of sunshine merely saturates the photoreceptor cells in our eyes, leading all the colours to be blended together, we are not able to perceive a single colour of the sun. When every colour of light is mixed, the result is white. As a result, the sun seems yellow on Earth but white in space.

The atmosphere on Earth also influences the colour of the Sun. As per NASA, we miss some of the blue hues of the sun as sunlight traverses the atmosphere because shorter wavelength blue light is dispersed more effectively than longer wavelength red light. Furthermore, all observable light wavelengths that travel via our atmosphere are attenuated, so that the light that enters our eyes does not instantly fill the cone receptors.

The US space agency further, "This allows the brain to perceive colour from the image with a little less blue-yellow. Though it does not affect what our eyes see, all x-ray and gamma-ray radiation is filtered out before it comes close to the ground. Most UV is absorbed by stratospheric ozone (above 10km) and most IR is absorbed by water vapour and other molecules with non-zero dipole moments."

Apart from that It further stated that when sunlight passes through many atmospheres, as it does during sunrises and sunsets, more blue light is dispersed and a considerably higher percentage of the longest wavelength (red) light reaches human eyes.

This article is written Diya Mukherjee

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